Tuesday, July 17, 2012

When Governor Walker submitted his op-ed "Obamacare is an unhealthy prescription" to the Washington Post, he
heavily "edited" Dr. Jonathan Gruber’s report on the impact of health
reform on Wisconsin. Dr. Gruber, a professor of Economics at MIT
contracted to work with Gorman Actuarial, drafted a non-partisan,
actuarial-based analysis to help Wisconsin understand the implications
of the Affordable Care Act on Wisconsin, especially the development of
exchanges. Citizen Action of WI responded to Governor Walker’s article
in a press release, saying that the Governor mis-represented the report’s findings.

We have been here before! Just about a year ago, on August 24,
2011, there was a showdown at the Department of Health Services. In an
invitation-only press conference, Wisconsin's Department of Health
Services Secretary Dennis Smith and Commissioner of Insurance Ted Nickel
announced that the Office of Free Market Health Care was releasing the
results of a health reform study. Clear from lengthy powerpoint presentation
that accompanied the press conference, were the instances where the
Department of Health Services inserted their own "footnotes" and numbers
into Dr. Gruber's report, referring to internal "DHS estimates" instead
of Dr. Gruber's actual data. Reporters tried to hold Dennis Smith
accountable, asking specific questions about instances where the
powerpoint presentation contradicted itself, or where the number of
individuals enrolled in Medicaid, for example, appeared mis-stated.

What Dennis Smith said a year ago:

It [the health reform law] will "drastically shrink" the numbers of people in the private insurance market;

It will cause "significant disruption" to employer-sponsored insurance; and

It
will force "working families" to pay a "hidden tax" that will
"subsidize" the purchase of health insurance for families earning up to
$89,000, a "forced redistribution of wealth."

In
fact, the conclusions Dennis Smith drew from the report were so
different from what the drafters intended, that Dr. Gruber himself went on the record
as saying, "Dennis Smith has long been clear in his opposition to
health reform and I think that is reflected in the way he chose to
present the results....Let's just say we went back and forth on the
wording of the report and that they asked us to emphasize the negative
far more than I would have chosen."

But that wasn’t enough to correct the record. On September 2, 2011, Dr. Gruber then submitted his own opinion piece
that concluded, “The bottom line is that health care reform in the
state of Wisconsin will dramatically reduce the number of uninsured in
the state, while creating both winners and losers among the existing
non-group insurance holders. The losers are those young and healthy
individuals who benefited from discriminatory pricing in a lightly
regulated insurance market. An important question for states like
Wisconsin, who have such lightly regulated insurance markets, is how to
help smooth the transition to this new regime for those young and
healthy individuals. Reports such as the one I co-authored for the state
of Wisconsin should be used to help states make those hard decisions -
and not as a source of selective fact selection in support of one's
political views.”

Not much has changed in a year, except that the “Office of
Free Market Health Care” in Wisconsin has closed for business. Or, as
Dennis Smith put it, “The best way to expand health insurance coverage
is to get the economy moving again and Americans back to work."